Sir William Quiller Orchardson R.A. 1832-1910

James Stanley Little, The Life & Work of William Q. Orchardson Royal Academician, Xmas Number of the Art Journal, 1897, pg. 21;
Cosmo Monkhouse, British Contemporary Artists, 1899, pg. 171

Late in April 1870 Orchardson leisurely embarked for Italy, reaching Venice by early April and taking rooms within the Casa Benetzki on the Grand Canal. He had intended to devote himself to painting in Venice but found the light too vivid and instead chose to make sketches and absorb the atmosphere of faded elegance. He took the ill-advised decision to swim every day in the canals, always casting his hat into the water first before leaping in head first after it. He employed the exclusive services of a young gondolier to ferry him through Venice’s waterways and to follow him as he swam through the waters, ‘one of those invaluable servants you find once or twice in a lifetime among the Latin races, but never, in ten lives, among the Teutons. Everything conceivable that an Englishman in Venice could require, Antonio sought and found.’ The handsome gondolier was also something of a romantic hero having risked all by offering himself for a blood transfusion (extremely risky and rarely attempted in those days) to save his fiancée after she contracted smallpox. ‘He forced his way to the girl’s bedside, took her in his arms where she lay, and never relaxed his hold for a day and a night, until the feeble spark of life was nourished back to the beginnings of flame.’ (Walter Armstrong, The Art of William Quiller Orchardson, 1895, pg. 27). Whilst Orchardson was in Venice he witnessed the girl’s seemingly miraculous recovery and marriage to Antonio and was greatly touched by the heroism of the valiant gondolier and his love for his beautiful young wife.

Undoubtedly Antonio and his fiancée were the stimuli for A Venetian Fruit Seller which was painted after Orchardson’s return to London. The swarthy young fruit vendor, his gondola laden with exquisitely painted gourds and onions, sprouting cloves of garlic and succulent oranges and lemons, approaches the kitchen door of some ancient residence where a demure young maiden awaits his arrival. Although she is carrying a basket for her purchases, her gaze is transfixed upon the eyes of the seller rather than his wares and there is clearly love in the air. Orchardson’s wonderfully energetic brushstrokes and subdued colour scheme perfectly capture the weathered ancient wall of the Venetian house and bridge.

Orchardson’s time in Venice had been a disappointing one, plagued by illness and conditions that he found to be against any possibility of painting. However he returned to London committed to paint several images of Venetian life including The Market Girl from the Lido painted in 1870, On the Grand Canal of 1871 and Moonlight on the Lagoons of 1875. A Venetian Fruit Seller is a rare rediscovery of one of the small number of paintings suggested by Orchardson’s trip to Venice.